Tipperary rock band Hurling perhaps knew what they were doing with that particular combination of name and point of origin. Made up of Eddie McCormack (who answered these questions for me – guitar and vocals), Ciara O’Brien (bass and vocals) and Kevin Callanan (drums), they’re an unusual act for Ireland, in that they draw heavy influence from turn of the Century emo acts like a personal favourite of mine, Jimmy Eat World.

At just two singles in, this interview almost by definition acts as quite a basic introduction to Hurling, but the melodic-rock and heartfelt vocals of ‘I Could Never Make A Glasshouse My Home’ and ‘Salem, Salem…’ immediately grabbed my attention, and there’s no better time than the present. Here’s what Eddie had to say about the band…

First of all, sorry to say you don’t get to call yourself ‘Hurling’ without having to explain it. Is the sport/ vomit double meaning a thing? Or just a Tipp thing?

We enjoy the sport name thing, big fans of American Football, Sports., Turnover and Modern Baseball, so it seemed funny at the time to call an Irish band, in that genre, ‘Hurling’. Then with us being from Tipperary and with some failed athletes in the band it kind of made sense.

We did have a conversation about the vomit connotations, but I don’t think we could come up with anything else, all the band names are pretty much done. Also most of our favourite bands have names that make them hard to look up so we went down that route [find them here to save you the Google – James].

Let’s take a little walk down the ‘what got us here’ route for a moment. What’s the story behind Hurling as a band and the way you came to be?

So Kevin and I were playing in a different band and around Autumn 2019 I was like “Hey I’d like to do a Run For Covers Records style band”. He might not even remember that exchange. Then the world shut down for a few years. Then in 2023 myself and Kevin started Hurling. we wrote and demoed a bunch of music before thinking about bringing anyone else in. It wasn’t until 2024 we asked Ciara to join up on bass, we thought she would say no, but she didn’t!

You’ve put a couple of tracks out since summer. How much music do you have ready to go?

We have a fairly big batch of songs written, it took us a few songs to really find the Hurling sound. It probably took us longer than we wanted to release our first song. We didn’t end up releasing the first single that we had mixed and mastered, just because it didn’t really sound like the other tracks we were working on. We have just started to write some instrumentals with an LP in mind, but before that there’s going to be a lot of songs released. 2026 should be a busy year for us with releases.

It’s nice to see an Irish band cite Death Cab and in particular Jimmy Eat World as a major influence. Are you all emo kids?

Not all of us. Ciara is not too deep in the emo weeds, she’s a big 70’s singer-songwriters- head, big Carole King and Fleetwood Mac fan, and ABBA too. Kevin and I found a lot of common ground with both Death Cab and Jimmy Eat World, and on the more ‘indie’ side of things we were both really into Bloc Party.

With Jimmy Eat World, we have both been listening to that band since we were, essentially, children. They are the first ‘emo’ band I ever listened too. I think that their record ‘Clarity’ is probably the greatest emo rock album made so it’s hard not to be influenced by them when making that style of music. Death Cab is one of those bands that greatly influenced how I play the guitar and I just adore how they structure their guitar parts. Ben Gibbard’s lyricism is so distinctive too, he has written so many songs that I wish I had penned.

The new single ‘I Could Never Make A Glasshouse Home’ is about a kind of dark relationship dynamic. What’s the story behind that – is it imaginary or more of a message to someone?

If you don’t like artists explaining art don’t read on… I hate to kill all of our mystique, but this is definitely not a diss track to anyone in particular. The song is centred on this emotionless relationship narrative, but my intent with that was to have it symbolise my own anxieties I was experiencing before writing that song, feelings of a-romanticism and my apathy. Thinking about these songs and their meaning, there’s a lot of musings on a feeling of stasis and a lack of personal growth. This was everything I was processing at the time I was writing these songs. So the relationship in ‘..Glasshouse’ is more symbolic of me just trying understand myself.

What about the previous single – if anything that seemed more Halloween themed?

‘Salem, Salem, Salem, Salem, Salem’ is definitely an autumnal song more than Halloween themed. I am an absolute Halloween head though, and would love to do a Halloween themed EP, just an absolute Misfits vibe. I know the orange and black artwork and the Sabrina The Teenage Witch/Salem Witch trails referencing song title make it seem very Halloween themed. But that song is just about being awkward and stressed out by people.

I won’t lie, I’m not a jazz man, broadly. Talk to me about Kevin’s jazz influence?

The three of us love some entry level jazz. I know it’s not audible in our music so far, but we have some songs with some odd time signatures coming down the line, and a lot of that was inspired by some of the jazz records we had been getting into over the last few years. We love McCoy Tyner’s ‘The Real McCoy’, John Coltrane’s ‘Blue Train’ and ‘A Love Supreme’. Kevin spent a lot of time listening to Elvin Jones’ drumming, and he’s a big Joe Morello fan too.

A lot of acts from less populated corners of Ireland talk about the challenges of building from outside the major population centres. How have you found that?

That is definitely one of the biggest struggles for us as a band, other than ‘the algorithm’. We are hoping that as we release more music we might have more opportunities to play some shows in the cities. Kevin and I are from Thurles and Ciara is from Templemore which are both fairly small towns. We managed to put on a show in Thurles last year that got just over 200 in the door, so there’s big love for original music where we are from which helps us.

Have you performed much live yet? What are you like as a live act?

We have played a small number of shows, generally they were all very spread out. Ideally we would get a nice run of shows together. We are definitely heavier live than on our recordings, it’s quite raw, which I enjoy. Very little gimmickry.

What are your plans going forward?

The most important thing for us is to keep making art that we are passionate about. Hopefully we can get as much new music out as we can next year. Maybe we will even play a few shows, hit us up. Maybe we could even find the oh so elusive second guitar player, doubt it.